I had a Jungian psychology professor once who had us do an exercise on “reclaiming projections”. Often when we form a strong bond with someone, it’s because we see things in them that we want to have or we’re afraid we have, but don’t feel totally capable of owning. This can be positive–if we value being creative, successful, and beautiful, we’ll find someone we think embodies those characteristics and admire them. It can also be negative–if we’re afraid of being rude or unlikable, we’ll find someone ruder and less likable than ourselves to reassure us that those qualities are in them, not us.
When we project too much onto other people, and/or they act in a way inconsistent with our projections, the relationship becomes unhealthy, for them or for us. Seeing your idol be imperfect can feel like a personal loss, because you’ve lost access to your method of exploring creativity and beauty and success. Or, your negative projection, a fixation on somebody’s flaws, can blind you to their real good qualities.
When your personal projection gets in the way of seeing someone as a real person, you need to get back in touch with those qualities inside yourself.
So we actually had to sit down and write: What qualities about this person inspire such strong feelings in me? What pieces of me have I invested in them? How do I have those qualities? How can I develop or handle those qualities in a way that doesn’t involve this person? What would my relationship with this person be like if I acknowledged these parts in myself and saw us as similar?
That was the exercise that let me finally start to heal and move on from a relationship I’d had where I very much admired a BNF, got her attention, and was a dedicated lackey and fangirl, and told my depression that I must be a good person, because someone I admired so much liked and spent time with me! And then… she had a bad reaction to her psych meds, totally misinterpreted something I said, told me I was a terrible friend, and dropped me like a rock. That experience stayed absolutely raw for a year and a half, until I started to take ownership of the positive things inside of me that I’d tried to displace onto her.
